All your hopes and dreams were tied up in that one person, and losing them feels like you’ve lost everything. It feels like the end of life as you know it.
Losing the love of your life is something you can’t prepare yourself for. It’s one of the worst things that can happen to you. It’s like part of your heart was taken away from you, and you are never getting it back.
It’s unbelievably hard. Pain can be overwhelming and excruciating. But a heartbreak is a lesson on its own, a lesson we don’t want to learn, but we don’t get to have any say in it.
You see relationships are made for two, and as soon as one side walks away, you are left without any other choice but to learn from your pain.
When it first happens you are telling yourself that you are OK, but you really aren’t
Your initial reaction is to be strong. Losing the love of your life is not something you can recover from overnight.
Even the strongest people get crushed when their heart gets ripped from their chest. Nobody can survive that standing up.
Feel your feelings. Admit that you are not OK and that it’s going to take you a long time before you can honestly say you are back on your feet.
Let it hurt. It’s supposed to hurt. You are supposed to cry and grieve over your loss. It will make the healing process a bit easier.
Healing is a process which can’t be rushed
You will feel the whole spectrum of emotions which will go from anger, sadness, despair, fear for the future to total numbness.
You will also have good days where you are feeling positive and strong. Those are the days that will recharge you and give you the push you need to keep moving forward.
Don’t expect that healing will happen in just a few days or months. Sometimes it takes a long time, and we are all different when dealing with our pain, especially if they were the hard love (this is one of the three loves in life).
You’ll miss them for a great while, and that’s something you can’t help
They were a huge part of your life, and you are going to be reminded of them constantly. Tears will come all on their own every time you see something that makes you think of them, and your thoughts will be your own worst enemy.
Even if the relationship was destined to end and you were not entirely happy in it, your mind will just replay all those happy moments you and your ex experienced together, and it will ignore all the ugly ones.
Don’t look at this as a sign you should do the impossible to get back together. Remind yourself that you shouldn’t chase after anyone who left you all alone and chose not to be part of your life.
Love is worth the fight, but it should never be begged for, and that’s a huge difference.
Social media is your enemy
You are going to go through your exe’s social media accounts. You will investigate every little clue in order to find some closure or the real reason why this person left you.
But in the end, you will realize that you are just hurting way more this way. You will never get the answers you want if they weren’t decent enough to tell you in person what it’s all about.
Your heart won’t be at ease if you keep seeing their happy faces or even pictures with somebody they could have more than friendship with.
Try to resist the urge to check up on your ex. Don’t go through their social media accounts. Don’t ask your mutual friends about them. It will only make you feel worse and more hurt.
You will stop daydreaming about you guys getting back together
It’s only natural that you will have these desires at the beginning. You will be nostalgic about that person and about all those amazing moments you shared together.
But as time goes by, you will realize that your ex is in the past for a reason. You will realize that you deserve better and that even though you cared for them deeply, they were just a big chapter of your life. This is not how the story ends.
You choose your life; you don’t settle for it
We can’t influence other people’s behavior. We can’t stop bad things that happen to us, but we can choose the way we deal with things.
We can spend days in bed and lots of time crying over the wrong course our life has taken or we can get up and make our own choices.
We can get up every day with a mindset that things will work out in the end. We can fight our pain and do things that shift our focus from our brokenness to empowering ourselves. If you do that, you will discover soon enough it’s the way to happiness.
You learn that you have enough strength to start a new life without them
After a certain period of time in which your lost love was all that you could think about, you will realize that you must keep on moving in spite of the pain. You will realize that you matter, too.
You will want to change your life. Your essence will and should always be the same. You will want to welcome newness in your life. You don’t need constant reminders of what you had and lost.
That’s why you might start with simple things like changing your hair or the way you dress, hitting the gym and finding a way to sweat out the pain, etc.
But you will want to shift your life in a big way, too. You will go after something you are passionate about. You will test your limits and get out of that comfort zone.
You will meet new people and have a brand new outlook on life. You will leave this pain with a personal victory of being the best version of yourself.
Losing the love of your life doesn’t mean that you lost your chance for true love
There is no doubt that the love you felt was for real, and maybe you thought that person was the love of your life when in reality, they were just your greatest love so far.
You will love again. As impossible as that sounds at the initial phases of your heartbreak, it’s true. The one that is the real love of your life will be there to stay forever.
That’s why the expression we use is a ‘forever person’—love with them never ends.
